d not the smallest doubt
of her complete ignorance of what was going on.... I left the house with
the pleasing consciousness of a work well done--a work that was destined
to have a considerable historic consequence. I only felt some little
twinge within, certain qualms of conscience about the conspiratorial
character of the transaction.

But even this text of the will did not quite satisfy my father's
"friends and advisers"; it was redrafted for the fourth and last time in
July, 1910.

This last draft was written by my father himself in the Limonovski
Forest, two miles from the house, not far from Mr. Tchertkof's estate.

Such is the melancholy history of this document, which was destined to
have historic consequences. "All this business is very disagreeable to
me, and it is unnecessary," my father said when he signed the paper that
was thrust before him. That was his real opinion about his will, and it
never altered to the end of his days.

Is there any need of proof for that? I think one need know very little
of his convictions to have no doubt about it.

Was Lyoff Nikolaievich Tolstoy likely of his own accord to have recourse
to the protection of the law? And, if he did, was he likely to conceal
it from his wife and children?

He had been put into a position from which there was absolutely no way
out. To tell his wife was out of the question; it would have grievously
offended his friends. To have destroyed the will would have been worse
still; for his friends had suffered for his principles morally, and some
of them materially, and had been exiled from Russia. He felt himself
bound to them.

And on the top of all this were his fainting fits, his increasing loss
of memory, the clear consciousness of the approach of death, and the
continually growing nervousness of his wife, who felt in her heart
of hearts the unnatural estrangement of her husband, and could not
understand it. If she asked him what it was that he was concealing from
her, he would either have to say nothing or to tell her the truth. But
that was impossible.

So it came about that the long-cherished dream of leaving Yasnaya
Polyana presented itself as the only means of escape. It was certainly
not in order to enjoy the full realization of his dream that he left his
home; he went away only as a choice of evils.

"I am too feeble and too old to begin a new life," he had said to my
brother Sergei only a few days before his departure.

Harasse